THE NATURALIST DEVELOPING. 73 
stood the thing in an instant.. Some one shouted comfort- 
ingly in my ear, as I rose spluttering from the sudden plunge, 
“Ha! ha! I think the fish has caught you instead! Hold on 
to him! hold on!” 
The fish was secured, after a desperate struggle, with our 
united force; and as I was yet quite a little fellow, the joke 
of my having been “caught by the fish,” was too good a one 
not to tell for a long time among such boys ! 
We had skating, too, in the winter, and many a wild scene 
there was when we were flying, like squads of swallows, hither 
and yon upon the ice. There were some winters when extra- 
ordinary floods came in the early part of the season, and then 
the whole forest on the lowest side of the plantation would 
be flooded, and its trunks stand several feet deep in the clear 
water. The change of a night or two would freeze this over 
suddenly—and then such a time! 
The earliest dawn of Saturday found us afoot with prepa- 
ration, for we had scarcely slept for eagerness through that 
long dull night of Friday! Such clanking of skates as we set 
off in a run, with a cold bite for breakfast in our hands, and 
some more stuffed into our pockets for dinner! This was too 
great a time to think much of eating. 
Away across the wide bare fields, scrambling over the 
rough, hard frozen ploughed ground in our thick boots, which 
made great clamor on the crisp clear morning air, we hurried 
with smoking nostrils and thick gloved hands. Our bodies 
just from the warm bed, are almost cut in two at first by the 
cold scythe of that winter’s breath in its wide keen sweep 
across the open fields—but soon we reach the shelter of the 
heavy wood, and then our blood comes glowing warm again 
back to the tingling surface, and with eager shouts we greet 
the ‘strange scene. 
Sunrise is streaming now down through the dark trunks in 
many a line of rosy light that is reflected in sharp broken 
blazes far and wide, from the aerial mirror underneath, 
